... With the addition of a few subheads and the omission of some of the introduction, this is a talk I gave to the conference on SCADS, state crimes against democracy, in London in October 2011. The rise of New Labour Robin Ramsay I was asked to talk about the rise of New Labour, presumably because in some way it illustrates the notion of a SCAD, a state crime against democracy. I will return to this at the end. I noticed that in one of the press releases for this event it was said that I 'will discuss the sinister millionaires and the money trail behind the rise of New Labour.’ I hope that no- one is here expecting ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 33) Summer 1997 Last| Contents| Next Issue 33 Contamination, the Labour Party, nationalism and the Blairites In footnote 6 in his essay on the Bilderberg group in Lobster 32, Mike Peters noted that the US Left had lost interest in the study of the power elite because the subject had become 'contaminated' by the interest in it taken by the US Right.(1) I had never thought of it as that, but 'contamination' is exactly right. Peters' naming of this issue was very useful, for ideological or political 'contamination' is at the heart of several of the areas in which Lobster has been interested in ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 51) Summer 2006 Last| Contents| Next Issue 51 The Labour Finance and Industry Group: a memoir Tim Pendry In March of this year, there was a major scandal over party funding in the United Kingdom. To some of us, this was an accident waiting to happen. In a country with many millions of voters who are allowed to exercise that vote only once every four or five years, relatively small numbers of people belong to those two or three political parties whose struggles eventually decide which person will eventually hold the power of patronage in the State, give orders to civil servants and have a finger perched precariously over a nuclear ...

... Lobster special issue The Clandestine Caucus Anti socialist campaigns 1996 and operations in the slightly amended British Labour Movement since and expanded 2012 the war Robin Ramsay Part 1: Clearing the ground: the unions, socialism and the state U.S. influence after the war Post-war: private sector propaganda begins to regroup Common Cause and IRIS Part 2 Atlantic Crossings Anti-communism as a profession: The Information Research Department The subversion hunters and the social democrats in the 1970s The Crozier operations Was there a 'communist threat'? Books and articles cited The Clandestine Caucus Anti-socialist campaigns and operations in the British labour movement since the war. Robin Ramsay 1996/slightly amended and expanded 2012. Part 1 Clearing the ground ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 44) Winter 2002 Last| Contents| Next Issue 44 New Labour Notes Ah, the wonderful private sector In 'Blair anti-corruption plan weakened by British firms' in The Independent 2 September 2002, Geoffrey Lean reported: 'Britain has the world's most corrupt companies, and some of the weakest legislation among industrialised countries for dealing with them....Half of the 70 companies identified by the World Bank as so corrupt that it has decided never to do business with them are based in Britain.' Lean commented: 'The revelation undermines a voluntary initiative to tackle corruption to be unveiled by Tony Blair in Johannesburg today as one of his main contributions to the ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 33) Summer 1997 Last| Contents| Next Issue 33 New Labour, New Atlanticism: US and Tory intervention in the unions since the 1970s David Osler All four of Tony Blair's new political appointees at the Ministry of Defence are part of Labour's Atlanticist network. Three of them, George Robertson, Lord John Gilbert and John Speller, are members of two interrelated bodies, the Atlantic Council and its labour movement wing, the Trades Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU). The fourth, Dr John Reid, has spoken at TUCETU conferences. Peter Mandelson, the most important back-stage player in British politics, has written a pamphlet ...

... career in the Social Democratic Party [SDP]) and he provides some intriguing background detail on this episode in British history.1 But is there a comparable book on the economic arguments that underpin the Coalition? We might normally expect Her Majesty's Opposition to have something – substantial – to say. But, apart from occasional moments of denial, the Labour Party position appears to be that it accepts the general assumptions made by the new government and would pursue broadly similar policies – but would either take twice as long to implement them and/or would hope something beneficial might turn up in the meantime. Unlike the 1980s (or during its previous spells in the wilderness in the 1930s and ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 37) Sumer 1999 Last| Contents| Next Issue 37 New Labour Notes John Smith: Old Labour's lost leader? In non-New LabourLabour Party circles the late John Smith is remembered with great reverence.(1) Quite what this is based on escapes me. All I can identify is his dislike of Peter Mandelson: Smith kept him at bay therefore Smith was a good man seems to be the argument. But John Smith was the man under whose influence the Labour Party began the sorry road it is now on when he decided to give up the entire economic game and do what the City told him; the man who, with ...

... house as soon as possible. It would have been interesting to have heard about how the values of that stratum of society at that time affected Livingstone and subsequently contributed to his views but this is not attempted by Hosken. This is a great shame as there are signs from other sources that Ken himself was politically active prior to joining the Labour Party. It was recently reported that Sir Christopher Gent, currently Chairman of GlaxoSmithKline, said that Livingstone had been an Executive Member of the Young Conservatives, in south London, in the 1960s.(5) Presumably this was pre-1966, the year that Livingstone took a lengthy trip around Africa. In 1984 John Carvel casually mentioned that ...

... the publication of a couple of ministerial diaries and some memoirs trickling into the public domain within 2-3 years of its demise. Today any change of administration is followed immediately by a slew of books, as its participants cash in with lucrative publishing deals and get their version of history into print as quickly as possible. Thus has the demise of Labour in May 2010 been marked. The accounts that have appeared include the absurdly self-centred, stating-the-obvious-at-all- times tales of Peter Mandelson; the fantastic, optimistic and daytime TV-oriented (and thus immensely popular) narrative of Tony Blair; Jonathan Powell's treatise on Machiavellianism; and the diarised compendium of sad little stories from Chris Mullin, as he crept ...